Sequoia backs Zed
zed.dev176 points by vquemener 7 hours ago
176 points by vquemener 7 hours ago
I love the spirit of Zed. From the principles to the low-level implementation details, it all screams "good taste". It's immensely interesting as an object of study (the code is great, from GPUI all the way up).
Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed. It's the obvious pragmatic choice to get a team together to support a thing, but I'm concerned by it.
Sublime Text solved this 17 years ago with the 40-year-old shareware model.
It's also faster than Zed, works on Linux/Win/MacOS, and is decently customizable.
The problem with accepting VC money is they will eventually demand a return on their investment, which means that the forces that drive enshitification will eventually come for Zed in some form. I suspect that we'll see more and more features locked behind a paid subscription and the open core of the editor will become neglected over time.
Here I am on my free-as-in-freedom operating system, making commits with my free DVCS tool in my free programmable text editor, building it with my free language toolchain, using my free terminal emulator/multiplexer with my free UNIX shell. VC backed tools like Warp and Zed that seek to innovate in this space are of zero interest to me as a developer.
I might HAVE to learn EMacs (prefer over Vim) because I think eventually everything else will be tainted by mandatory AI features and/or subscriptions.
Zed is fully open source. Fork it. The code is pretty nice, too, easy to understand.
And Zeds multiplayer features might make it so your workplace mandates Zed if you're unlucky and Zed succeeds with their plan.
I hate to break it to you, but emacs was a product of the MIT AI lab.(prep.ai.mit.edu anyone?).
classical AI and modern generative AI are VERY different beasts. also, there isn't any AI in emacs itself. It was a tool built to make a job easier.
That’s fine as long as they don’t force AI prompts to me.
To clarify, I use AI agents, but I absolutely hate them submitting code in my editor. Chatting is fair enough and useful, but I need to turn off the auto-generating code part.
Note to Zed: I prefer paid products to enshittened ones.
Please please please, get paid rather than holding on too tightly to making things free forcing future enshittening.
We're working on it! :)
You can pay for Zed today if you'd like - https://zed.dev/pricing - and also the editor itself is open-source under the GPLv3 license. So if at any point in the future Zed changes direction in a way you don't like, you are perpetually free to build the version you liked from source (or make a community fork and take it in a different direction).
I would also pay for Zed (the editor) and not the AI. But I also don't want to pay just make Zed more attractive for VC acquisition.
You don't have to give me any more features than what's in the free editor. I would gladly pay up to $300 just to have a "license".
This will sound a bit odd, but I don't necessarily want to pay in a way that makes it look like I'm paying for the AI rather than the editor.
I already pay for Zed Pro, but my fear (and likely GP's as well) is that this doesn't provide enough revenue for the team.
Since switching from Emacs last year, I have absolutely loved how this editor has evolved, and I am looking for any way to directly support the effort. I have been a Zed Pro subscriber for quite a while now, and I have started trying to contribute to the codebase, but I really wish there were monetization options beyond making a spread on Anthropic API pricing.
I'm enjoying using Zed, and I do pay for tools I use regularly. It's now approaching a month of daily use for me and I don't see that changing. But to echo the other replies, I'm uninterested in the LLM tools. I don't use those normally and paying for that as a way to support Zed would send the wrong signal. You have to be careful when you restrict what people can pay for, because that will become what you optimize for which may not be what your users actually care about.
Zed is fast, easy to configure (so far, maybe some hard parts I haven't run into yet), works well with the languages I care about via LSPs, and the collaboration features are compelling. I want to pay to support that, I don't want to pay for an LLM feature I don't care about that ends up distracting from the progress on the things I want to see maintained or improved.
Big fan of Zed. I want to echo a sibling comment that I don't see that as paying for Zed, I see it as paying for LLM usage. And since I already have my own LLM keys, I just use those instead.
I'm a big fan of Zed and having met much of the team I think it's some great people building a great product. But I do echo concerns that while the intentions are all honorable the incentives of the pricing structure, business environment, and now a funding round are concerning in the long term. I don't think anyone at Zed has a single ill intent or a secret master plan but these days anything I'm not paying for I just assume is going to be enshittified eventually. Especially for an app where the only paid features are AI-centric and there's a VC expecting to make multiples on a $60m investment.
So here's my ask: let me pay for it without paying for AI! None of my use cases will stress your servers; I have `"disable_ai": true` in my settings.json. Give me a $5/mo "support the devs tier" or a $10/mo tier with some random app quality-of-life features and I'm there. I specifically want to pay for good software without paying for AI to signify the value proposition that still exists there cause I don't think a VC would believe me otherwise.
Unless they have very unusual terms on their funding, it isn't really entirely in their control in the long term. Hopefully they find a way to make their investors whole that doesn't suck for everyone else, but if not, well, I at least appreciate that the editor is truly open source, since at least it offers a contingency plan in the worst cases.
If I'm wrong I'd love to know, but I think that we need to start talking about what funding really implies more honestly. It's traditionally met with unabashed enthusiasm and congratulations, which I totally understand, but it's a mutual exchange, not an award or a grant. I absolutely believe that everyone wants to make good on their promises, but promises made to users are not legally binding, and the track record for upholding those has not been great. Plus, as a user, I want to pay for software, but nothing feels worse than paying, then watching enshittification unfold anyways... When this happens, the investors should send you a nice postcard thanking you for paying back some of their money.
Can $20/mo sustain a text editor company with a massive multimillion dollar valuation? Well, we'll see. Good luck Zed Industries, we're all counting on you.
I mean, eventually, sure. It took Uber around 15 years to get to profitability. ChatGPT came out in 2022, so get your predictions for 2037 in now.
Same. Especially not having been familiar with who Sequoia is. Altman, Huang, Musk, etc.
> "I don't think an editor should be VC backed"
it's a software company. they sell software.
> To make this possible, we're building DeltaDB: a new kind of version control that tracks every operation, not just commits.
Let me guess: DeltaDB is free to use as long as we host your data and have free range on training AI based on your editor interactions.
Definitely sounds very eerie. Luckily there are open source solutions that do just this with no AI integration:
this doesn't seem related to the above post
that said atuin is excellent
how is atuin doing what deltaDB does?
ah not much at all, did too much selective reading on my end. Should have read the entire blog and not the quoted selection.
Not sure what this guess is based on. Would that be a guess for git also, if mentioned by a company versus an individual?
My read was that they are pulling a Linus Torvalds with the Linux->Git move where both are innovations on their own, but work great together ( without dystopian universe instantiation )
CRDTs mentioned: https://zed.dev/blog/crdts
I love working in Zed. It really is a delight to use, and I think the Agentic coding integration is really well done. I'm excited to see them investing in this space more.
I understand people's concerns about VC funding, but I think building quality products takes capital. The funding is still relatively small, especially when you compare it to players like Cursor, etc. And I think Zed is a much, much better product!
Zed being OSS is a gift to the community, and I suspect DeltaDB will be as well. And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human.
Congrats, Zed!
DeltaDB sounds of being a >git innovation for coding itself, and would fulfill Zed's promises in Nathan Sobo's debate/discussion with Steve Yegge recently.
Seems to solve a real problem which is growing rapidly, both in the old way and in the new way ... if it can overcome _slop_ in LLM chats, and the sheer enormity of code/data ahead. Trying to picture how coherence will survive.
With claims/hype/concern floating around that >90% of code will be LLM-generated within 3-6 months, with the insinuation/tone [1] that the same amount of code will be written by humans as now ( at least at first ) but LLM code will radically grow to dilute the space ( as is happening ) ... seems like DeltaDB being done right/well is going to be do-or-die on whether coherence remains possible!
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-...
For anyone not clicking through the link: it's from 5 months ago, predicting 90% of today's code will be from LLMs.
>I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code.
They're going to keep saying it because it's a juicy sound bite and they're sales people. That doesn't make it any more true than "9 out of 10 dentists recommend our socks" or how we surely have all had flying cars for decades now.
I had a week where I embraced and went deep on ai first coding (not vibe, that'd be crazy)
The thing wrote at least 80%, so we aren't far off in this anecdotal instance. There are citizen devs who are building fun things for themselves where the AI does 100%
It made me realize these things are more capable than I knew, though they still do dumb stuff reliably. But, it is easy to undo those changes, so the productivity boost remains
By sheer volume, that 90% number might be right.
I agree. The level of dilution is becoming obvious and a big problem... code is becoming predominantly disposable
Despite the article being salesmanship hype ( at WEF no less ) we are now in the time mentioned, and can feel this
The idea that the code is GOOD or even being used is not necessary to be saying that it exists, strewn everywhere
Have they fixed the big/feature where it insists on downloading entire distributions of Node.js for running it's language server functionality?
This is basically my main gripe with Zed atm — it's very keen to autodownload and execute binaries.
I have a light fork that tries to nullify this, but I don't think I've managed to catch all the instances.
Other than that, it's a very nice editor in my opinion.
Easy fix:
{ "server_url": "", }
I comment out that JSONC line periodically when I feel like cherry-picking updates
Sounds like a noble goal.. but I'm skeptical. I normally don't care about every single edit I've done, and don't want to store them and certainly don't want to see other people's character level edits.
Also how on earth do you handle conflicts?
This sounds most similar to IntelliJ's local history tracking, but that is local only which makes sense.
Still, more IDEs is always good so I wish them luck and will wait and see. (As with Zed - I keep trying it but it's still very alpha quality so I always end up back in VSCode.)
Oh well, back to Sublime Text.
RIP Zed, you had a good run.
Met the CEO of Zed. Very humble and deeply technical. Glad to see they're doing well!
What on earth do they need this kind of money for?
Am I the only one that associates "Zed" and "development" with Zed Shaw? I don't think he has anything to do with zed.dev, unfortunately.
I really appreciate Zed Shaw for walking his own path and sticking to his guns.
I miss some of his old posts that he took down from his website, in particular the one on learning statistics, that was a great one.
In violation of their own Code of Conduct. I am uninstalling right away.
The beginning of the end.
You know where this goes.
> we've been building the world's fastest IDE
Any data to backup this?
Well, last year, Nikita Tonsky measured it and it did worse than Sublime: https://mastodon.online/@nikitonsky/112146684329230663
It's funny how often people buy into the marketing and say "blazing fast" without actually questioning it. FWIW, I still prefer Zed because its LSP integration and vim mode are better than Sublime's.
It's commendable to try and challenge Sublime, the undisputed performance champion in GUI text editing, but making false claims is a massive red flag.
I know it probably didn't, but I wonder if part of Sequoia's decision to invest had anything to do with these false claims?
Yes if a software markets itself like this without backing up I smell BS.
Like any company now is "global leader in X market".
You can try it out. I would say it’s aiming to be a more modern Sublime Text, which is a win to be considered in the same category imo.
I have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code.
The modern Sublime Text is Sublime Text. There is way too much "extra" in Zed to compare it. If anything, it's a new IntelliJ.
This is accurate. I came over from Sublime Text because it had become laggy over >5 running instances, and native LLM integration. Even VS Code doesn't actually have that... where everything is an extension versus seamlessly/perfectly fitting
As mentioned in other comments, it actually outperforms window management in general in many/most cases. Radically flexible and almost never gets in the way
zed is just on the hype train, obviously very talented people, they are thinking hard about LLMs but I'm not really sure where they are going, their pivot is probably going to be more interesting...
I don't know what's DeltaDB, but if it will be able to show when a commit is simultaneously a refactoring and a change of code being refactored (moved into another module) – I would love to see that! At the moment if you refactor you punish the people reviewing the code, which reverses the motivation for cleaning things up.
It’s sounds very similar to Google wave, if anyone remembers that, but for code.
That came back as Slack and other similar products
Nothing since then really recaptured what I personally liked about GWave or let me use their tool in similar ways to how I used it. YMMV, of course, more so than most of my comments.
feels like we are giving up privacy for productivity.
wouldn’t be the first time a massive investment from someone like sequoia sparks the death of a previously great tool/service
Yea, this announcement makes it less likely I will try Zed
I don't want chat with coworkers in my IDE, nor do I feel the pains they describe with conversations spread between tools. It's not a top 5 problem
For the record: I have never used the collaboration aspects of Zed
What I also have not used is vim emulation, though I have a vim background
As mentioned elsewhere, Zed is still very configuration-dependent to get the full power of it, and a lot of its functionality is never discovered for that reason
What pushed me to try it was Ollama integration which is not an afterthought, then I realized I loved it _way_ more than SublimeText, especially on performance, at first, then everything else once that won me over
I have ~10 running instances at any given moment, and >99% of the time never feel any lag, whatsoever
Another unexpected benefit is that terminals, code editor panels, and assistant chats, get to be sized and fit wherever you want, so it is also kind of a window manager... I often have more terminals open in Zed than in the Window Manager of the OS itself
> then I realized I loved it _way_ more than SublimeText, especially on performance
I currently have 19 instances of Sublime Text open, each to a separate folder containing a mix of C++ and Python code bases (some tiny some huge). Like ~8 of those have the clangd LSP plugin enabled. I don't think I've ever experienced lag in Sublime. KDE System Monitor is reporting 2.0 GiB of ram being using by sublime currently.
The clangd LSP plugin in Sublime isn't perfect, and it does occasionally break, and rarely spikes in CPU usage for no reason (although the editor always remains responsive). But, if I ever switch away from Sublime Text, I cannot imagine it ever being due to performance reasons.
I do all those same things in VS Code, especially the vim bindings, wouldn't give those up, but did recently leave the vim ecosystem because I had to spend too much time making the IDE work or enable features that are out-of-the-box in a code-oss based IDE
You probably give up just as much privacy with VS Code as you do with Zed, no? Just sent to different overlords?
If you're using it at work, the company might decide the risks are outweighed by the increased productivity.
Zed defaults don't seem to capture the full value of what it offers. For instance, edit predictions via tab completion are documented yet I've never experienced them. I need better settings, I guess.
Cool, I basically get the same effect with "code snapshots" with using jj so I wonder if this will be different.
I think they're tackling a real problem that is revealing itself via agentic coding, and I think they've positioned themselves in an interesting spot.
I'd be interested to know how much data DeltaDB accumulates over time - because the level of granularity is so high - and are they going to want to use that data as training data?
I love Zed, but this makes me worry for its future. VCs are not the end user, and thus don't understand the perils of enshittification.
Great, maybe they can finally make Zed start maximized instead of this small window and add a picker for recent files (not projects)! ;)
The problem I see is the VC involvement...
VCs operate from the goal of xtreme high user market share as the problem..
As frameworks get better, the audience using the IDE changes...
Both are misaligned before even meeting and it will get worse once VC money control is added.
My bias, I am a flutter framework user and MS VSCode user.
OK they touched Unity and now Zed. I’m sure it’s going to be good.
Not a good move. Evernote went that path and then turned an otherwise very useful app into a VC bet that forced the founders to pivot the app into something nobody wanted. Same happened to Soundcloud.
Congratulations!!
Let the enshitification begin.
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I don't know why you are being downvoted. This is a real issue and a legitimate concern to have as a user of this software. I feel the same way (never used Zed in the first place because they are VC backed, but this would have been the final straw for me, too).
Because Paul consistently violates HN guidelines:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Hard to take their Code of Conduct seriously anymore https://zed.dev/code-of-conduct
Flagged now, apparently HN supports the Zionist and anti-Muslim opinions of the Sequoia partners
A sibling comment claims that making a comment like this constitutes waging a 'political'/'ideological' battle that 'tramples curiosity', because raising a legitimate concern is inherently ideological, but silencing any and all scrutiny of a VC is not.
Who at Zed played League of Legends during an investor call then?
We should never forget how idiotic Sequoia have been.
That brings them to 120x the amount of money I've invested in the same problem, and still they're only just announcing that they're intending to start trying to do something that I've already done better
Can we see?
It's apparently this but I can't really say that I get it: https://bablr.org
He seems to be saying he spent $350k making this. I guess it's some tooling for writing parsers.
He has this to say about Zed:
> Zed: Founded by Atom’s dev team, Zed was the rewrite that Atom always wanted to be able to do but couldn’t when Microsoft bought Github and made the executive decision to kill a product it might otherwise have had to compete with. Unfortunately Zed decided to do that rewrite in Rust. This has slowed their iteration speed, caused much of their dev effort to go to cross-platform support instead of innovation, cut them off from being able to offer their experience on the web, severely limited their hackability, and generally made theirs a niche tool for enthusiasts. What’s worse, their reliance on LSP — a product which believes that the presentation layer should be the primary abstraction layer — means their product is forever doomed to look like a VSCode knock-off. [1]
IMO in the 12 months or so I've been aware of the BABLR work and observed the author's comment contributions, they've never really substantiated why BABLR would be preferable to tree-sitter, or how a JS-based implementation of parser tech can fulfill any of the same niches. Most consumers of tree-sitter leverage it via FFI or native code, not an embedded or external JS runtime.
It's not clear to me how you could substantially replace the capabilities/benefits of what LSP provides with BABLR either.
I don't think they are doomed to be a VSCode knock-off due to their technical decisions. I think they decided to be a VSCode knock-off by design. I mean they follow the same project oriented GUI design that VSCode and Sublime helped make popular. There is nothing inherent to their tech that required that.
Haha yes I wrote that, thank you for sharing.
We're approaching the problem by drawing from browser design. We want to see an editor with a DOM API for code documents. BABLR is a parser framework meant as a direct answer to Tree-sitter.